ates to be shut against them.

During the course of this eventful day, in which so many errors had
happened from the likeness the twin brothers bore to each other, old
Aegeon's day of grace was passing away, it being now near sunset; and
at sunset he was doomed to die, if he could not pay the money.

The place of his execution was near this convent, and here he arrived
just as the abbess retired into the convent; the duke attending in
person, that if any offered to pay the money, he might be present to
pardon him.

Adriana stopped this melancholy procession, and cried out to the duke
for justice, telling him that the abbess had refused to deliver up her
lunatic husband to her care. While she was speaking, her real husband
and his servant Dromio, who had got loose, came before the duke to
demand justice, complaining that his wife had confined him on a false
charge of lunacy; and telling in what manner he had broken his bands,
and eluded the vigilance of his keepers. Adriana was strangely
surprised to see her husband, when she thought he had been within the
convent.

Aegeon, seeing his son, concluded this was the son who had left him to
go in search of his mother and his brother; and he felt secure that his
dear son would readily pay the money demanded for his ransom. He
therefore spoke to Antipholus in words of fatherly affection, with
joyful hope that he should now be released. But to the utter
astonishment of Aegeon, his son denied all knowledge of him, as well he
might, for this Antipholus had never seen his father since they were
separated in the storm in his infancy; but while the poor old Aegeon
was in vain endeavouring to make his son acknowledge him, thinking
surely that either his griefs and the anxieties he had suffered had so
strangely altered him that his son did not know him, or else that he
was ashamed to acknowledge his father in his misery; in the midst of
this perplexity, the lady abess and the other Antipholus and Dromio
came out and the wondering Adriana saw two husbands and two romios
standing before her.

And now these riddling errors, which had so perplexed them all, were
clearly made out. When the duke saw the two Antipholuses and the two
Dromios both so exactly alike, he at once conjectured aright of these
seeming mysteries, for he remembered the story Aegeon had told him in
the morning; and he said, these men must be the two sons of Aegeon and
their twin slaves.

But now an unlooked-for j